


avec le geste drôle des débutants

by DanseDan



Category: Disco Elysium (Video Game)
Genre: (mentioned) - Freeform, Domestic Fluff, Executive Dysfunction, Harry and Kim have a dinner date in wherein both insist they are not having a dinner date, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, M/M, Mutual Pining, Not Actually Unrequited Love, Post-Canon, Pre-Slash, Trans Kim Kitsuragi, milder than canon-typical substance issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-11
Updated: 2021-03-16
Packaged: 2021-03-17 17:14:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 10,191
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29969673
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DanseDan/pseuds/DanseDan
Summary: Harry Du Bois is four months fully sober after Martinaise (not without considerable, if occasionally misguided, effort). Kim Kitsuragi has been sticking to his habits as a loner at the 41st for four months (regardless of the efforts of his co-workers). They both think they make a hell of a pair, but they’ve kept a friendly distance for each other's sakes.One stray winter weeknight, Kim agrees to come over for dinner.
Relationships: Harry Du Bois/Kim Kitsuragi
Comments: 22
Kudos: 33





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I've been kicking around a lot of these ideas for a while and decided to finally write a snippet of what I think life after Martinaise is probably like for Kim and Harry-- it'll be a shorter fic! Probably around three or four chapters. the title is a shameless french translation of an Alejandro Zambra quote that partially inspired this.

Wake up- time to listen to the radio.

You love the radio. You really, really love the radio. You think the radio was the greatest purchase you have ever made- drunk you was horrible, and traumatizing, and entirely undebatably subhuman, but he did buy this radio, and by god fuck if that isn't his saving grace (a story comes to mind- a Dolorean allegory from your childhood- about a selfish rich woman and a lazy cheating bum both ferried up to heaven by a single onion that she'd given him during their lives as charity. You choose to ignore the part where they fight and fall back into hellfire because crying is firmly not on the agenda for a morning alone off work). It's the thing that broke you off from your penitent monk-like refusal to buy anything for yourself other than flour for a week after THE HANGED MAN, it's what got you into cycling and hanging out with the neon-eyebleed-catsuit crew every weekend for race practice and crappy breakfast, it's what reminded you that public libraries exist and nobody will ask you why you're in there reading about suzerainty-era motor carriage manufacturing and the homo-sexual underground. It's the greatest thing since communism, since disco, since-- since-- since cigarettes and kebabs and- and--

... And idolizing someone to the point of canonization. Which you aren't supposed to be doing. Not on The Agenda, Harry-boy! Move along quick—it’s a good thing the radio cranks up real loud, because you can blare it while you work through breakfast and keep yourself on autopilot. You’re a smooth-move-real-time-action-off-duty-cop-cooking-machine, whisking eggs and cheap cheese with *no mold on it* (anymore) into a *clean* (probably) glass bowl while a buttered pan lies in wait on the fire, firing up the neurons in your newly undrowning olfactory cortex (oh, the joys of not drowning your taste buds in alcohol! Being able to taste butter!) and starting to lift you out of your morning haze. The song on the radio is bright, with a softly reverberating guitar riff and a sultry-sounding female singer on a jaunty drumbeat that has you shuffling and swaying to yourself as you watch the eggs bubble in the pan and consider your plans for the day.

Bring in The Agenda! Mentally, that is. You realized real quick you were too fidgety for paper- Agenda 1.0, a gift from Kim for your one month of sobriety, was too-quickly decimated with your idle paper-picking, scribbling, and inexplicable inability to have a functional pen on you at any given time (you tried so, so hard. You licked *so many* ballpoints that month that your toothbrush ended up an incredibly suspicious shade of ultramarine blue) so you ended up buckling down and internalizing it (after reverently tucking Agenda 1.0 away into a safe box of memories, like it deserved). Within the system are three intentional sections: WORK, LIFE and BEING A DECENT HUMAN PERSON. You try not to think of the less-intentional sections that tend to bubble up, like REASONS WHY YOU SHOULD BE HORRIFYINGLY SORRY AND NEVER ALLOW YOURSELF TO FEEL JOY AGAIN YOU DISGUSTING LITTLE SHELL OF A MAN, or REMINISCING THAT’S GONNA HURT REAL BAD FOR AT LEAST A COUPLE HOURS or, your latest and greatest adversary, THINKING ABOUT KIM.

It was only once you cleared that first month that you really had the time to realize it was an issue. Before, in the shaky seas of constant brain fog and migraines, your aching wounds and constant muscle cramps, you didn’t have the mental capacity to consider your dependence on him past being blindly thankful and following him around like a lost puppy-dog. It took getting to the meaner sets of precinct jabs for you to realize you really had to back off and let the lieutenant have his own life, and even then it’s still an effort not to spend too long considering Kim- wondering about his whereabouts, his mood, his habits, digging at every bit of curiosity until you wind up with a grocery list of obviously over-intrusive questions that you then need to build up the volition *not* to ask.

Try as you might, you’ve realized it’s pretty much consummately impossible to reclaim this real estate in your mind, no matter how many hobbies, pet projects or personal investigations you take up your time with, so you’ve reached the tenuous compromise of veering away from appalling violations of your partner’s privacy and into Kim-adjacent life wisdom and-or trivia topics, things you can get into that *won’t* make those precious few conversations with him into uncomfortable interrogations and instead maybe even improve your quality of life. It’s almost like being functional, except it totally isn’t and you need to stop. Baby steps, you tell yourself.

On The Agenda for today, WORK is all the way blank- usually a grim prospect for a weekday where you aren’t ensured the social cushion of your painfully multicolored comrades from the cycling club- but its emptiness is thoroughly relieved by the tantalizing promise of a rarer LIFE event: getting to cook dinner for Kim at your place. Maybe a little too tantalizing, considering how hard your anticipation is making it to settle down and work on what to do for the rest of the day. Four months sober and finally all the way clean from drugs, the new constant on your BEING A DECENT HUMAN PERSON list is a pesky new chain-smoking habit you picked up while trying to fight back against the absolute mush of your newly-sober mind and get back into working shape. It’s part of the horrible process of getting better that not only do all of your flaws seem much more glaringly obvious as you improve, but you end up with all-new shitty habits from your desperate attempts to figure it all out, a part that sucks fat nuts and you don’t like to think about, considering the way it makes the chorus of assholes permanently cohabitating in your brain with you perk up into new arguments for backsliding into the cozy little hellhole you’ve spent so much effort trying to crawl out of.

On the bright side, being back at the bottom of the barrel does help you fret a little less about what to do- one clever trick you learned from that obligatory sobriety counselling you got thrown at that first month, to *relish the absence of decisions*. Basically, your addiction-addled brain is a crappy little animal that keeps trying to choke itself on things it shouldn’t be eating, and your only job is not to put shit on the floor so you don’t have to get into a wrestling match with it later, once you realize there’s something in its maw. In tandem with your newly-acquired sense of self-respect (shabbily cobbled-together through feeling sorry for everyone who has had to suffer your existence as it might be), this mostly means keeping yourself in situations where you won’t be allowed to be a total fuckup: hanging around Kim being the first, of course, but also going to the library (one of the scant few buildings in the area that bans indoor smoking, and which offers a great wealth of distractions) or tiring yourself out with exercise (which not only busies up all of your body, but also lets your mind settle brainlessly into a monologue of authoritative nonsense from coach Physical Instrument and company, a much-needed break from consciousness as the perpetual threshing machine of your mind rattles on in the background). The highlight of today will be dinner with Kim- dish to be decided, though you’ve been throwing around options in your head all week- and that means you’ll have to be awake and active and not horribly aching, so, library it is. Maybe you can even look through some cookbooks while you’re there, get some ideas.

Conveniently, Jamrock’s public library is only about two blocks from your apartment, inconveniently, that’s still *outside*, which you have to get clean and dressed and ready for, acts that you have discovered are not cured of their inexplicable difficulty even by sobriety. Somehow, like wading through sand, best-laid plans tend to make their way towards actually occurring at mysterious and uncontrollable intervals. Of which now is not one, apparently, because despite bringing just about the entire committee in your head to agreement on both location and process, you absolutely cannot bring yourself to get up from the kitchen and shower. You wash dishes, dry them, haphazardly tuck them away, listen all the way through a folk music block on the radio, rearrange a handful of crude poems with the magnets on your fridge, contemplate fixing the hole in your wall you’ve been hiding behind an amateurish portrait of Mazov, and still your body refuses to take itself to the bathroom for that shower. It wouldn’t even be a long shower, it could be totally short and easy and you could be out the door doing the thing you actually want to do instead… but you can’t think your way out of it, halfway because you’re still generally bleary, but halfway because this is just apparently how your brain works. Splendid stuff.

And again a niggling little voice in the back of your head reminds you of the pack of cigarettes that’s half-full on the balcony right now- a way to quickly clear your head. It mostly makes you want to throw them out the window, but you’re not supposed to do that, you’re only supposed to quit a little at a time and anyway you’d probably relapse immediately considering that everyone you know smokes, and almost everyone in Révachol smokes, leading to the whole reason why you need to go to the library, because the second you manage to waddle over to the balcony to put them away and save them from getting all soggy and disgusting you’re hit by the warm, heady scent of tobacco in the air, floating in from adjacent apartments or the street below, or both, or maybe simply emanating from the atmosphere- maybe the city herself is a smoker, too. Soon enough it’s not much of a choice, and a cigarette is lit and warm and in your hands and throat, and your mind is clear enough that you can properly start to work through this whole ‘why can’t I just do stuff that I want to do’ thing without getting a headache.

Different tasks have different textures and balances, you think. Different levels of attention, different skills to apply to them, a different feeling in your gut when you get through to doing them at all. And also sometimes they *seem* less important. Mostly it’s when they seem obvious- you think about your shower problem and how difficult it is to get actually clean and dressed every single morning and especially on your days off and it sounds miserable to worry over anything that automatic and you always think it’s going to be inevitably done sometime until you realize it’s never done because you have to do it. And if you’re on the subject of why showering is particularly terrible, the balance of it is ridiculously bad, when it’s a mindless task but you have to commit to making it be mindless because you can’t just bring a book inside the shower (you’ve tried and failed, and only later realized you didn’t even actually shower while trying to read, just kinda got wet and ruined a perfectly good book) and thinking about anything is hard because the texture is so horrible as well. The fact that you can’t depend on the feeling of clothes to ground yourself, the smallness of the shower, and that you have to see and interact with your nakedness directly is already hard enough, but since the water is so loud that you can’t listen to the radio you’re left with a more than disconcerting stream of thoughts that feels about as appealing as wading into a pool of sewage.

Maybe this is why you drank- the man you used to be had never smoked like this, not as often as you or for nearly the same reason. Lieutenant Double-Yefreitor Du Bois, the gleaming, Sad-infested bastard from your ID badge, from the wreckage you were born in, wanted to be numb, dropped-down, down to absolute zero, outside the bounds of all the human noise inside his head. Maybe you’d always been that way, from when you learned to think. An image arises in your mind's eye-- a baby, dirty, hideous, its skin mottled and raw and red, peeling, stretching almost impossibly. The baby cries from pain- in its brief stay on this earth it has already suffered more than some men do in their entire lives. He is built for it- thick skin, quite literally. He is being held by a slight, pale, ugly nurse- a nun in bloodied white rags with a terrible smell of herbs permanently attached to her. The scene is a caricature of mother and child- the hideous thing, held up to her chest, is drinking from an amber bottle, clouded over. In ten years, the contents of this bottle he will be legally too young for-- is this the reason you became the way you are? Are you just born-and-bred this way, surviving off of alcohol where most people had blood and human kindness?

\-- It's not. The little pastiche you've thought up for yourself is half propaganda and half racist idiocy. Despite what some may say, not everyone on the Insulindian is thrown on the bottle the moment they're weaned from the tit. In truth, you were barely even medicated, and those bitter, herbaceous spirits are not the cause of your current addiction. It's still on you Harry, it's always still on you. But human odds aren’t bad- just look at Kim and his One Cigarette, that’s human. That’s a human choice that’s powered by volition, by control, by diligence. What makes him that sort of animal, that sort of elegant beast? How’d he start doing that? does he start smoking freely, like you once did as a young man? The imagine you can manage to conjure up is obviously inaccurate, enticing- it’s him, just as lithe and strong and intellectual, dressed up in a leather jacket, smiling with a younger face, his lips around a Soldier and his skin smelling like the warm tar, his lips tasting like it, like the second or third cigarette of the evening now rendered impossible. Or is he, by the time he gets to cigarettes, the type of man to choose to smoke his one-per-day? Like some line from a ham romance on the radio, does he put the killing thing right between his teeth, denying it the power to kill him?

You’re not good at that denial- the second your train of thought’s properly reached its end, you realize your fingertips are burning from the fourth cigarette of the morning and not the first, and you still don’t feel like taking that shower. As the smoke on your face and in your belly clears, the cold wind feels like a chastisement that’s doled out too light- or maybe you’re just used to the cold by now, a side effect of another piece of advice you’d cribbed from counseling and had to turn to more often than not, the grounding shock of ice water on your skin. You pay it mind though, there’s stuff today on The Agenda, and there’s Kim coming tonight, and even, in a little corner of your mind, there’s you and your humanity, the type of animal you’d like to become while you have time left, for the sake of it.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was going to be responsible and consistent but I have decided that I get to go crazy go stupid tonight...... as a treat.....
> 
> cw for... jokes about wanking? brief but deeply unsexy mention of wanking. As well as a brief but not superficial description of self-harm scars.
> 
> The format in the latter bit of the chapter gets fucked over by the mobile site but as long as you use the desktop site it looks fine on mobile devices ^^;;; sorry eh

You hide the cigarettes around the house. It feels stupid, and you know you’ll be embarrassed having to pull the Jamrock Shuffle in your own apartment, that you’re a grown adult who could just *buy another box of cigarettes* whenever you wanted to, but you feel like it helps. Drag the killing thing away from the crappy little animal even for a couple moments more, let yourself get tired out like the old man you are below all the disco scaffolding. You can’t really bring yourself to shower, but you drag the radio into the bathroom with you and wash yourself in the sink. You try to be good about it- stay away from the mirror, really lather up and clear away the sweat that’s caked to you throughout the night and morning, feel the warm graze of the water on your skin. You brush shampoo through your hair and work it, focus on the humming feeling of the bristles on your scalp, trying not to think of much of anything, just the smell of the cheap powdery soap and of what clothes you’ll wear today, try to settle into a better memory of this instead of picking at the shame you feel about how hard it is for you. ducking your head into the stream of the water in the sink and forgetting everything except the whishing, scratching sounds of cleaning.

Being clean feels good and being dressed again feels maybe even better (knit sweaters are a revelation- who could’ve known polyester satin wasn’t made for seaside winters?), so by the time you walk your way into the Jamrock public library the morning’s incidents are nigh-forgotten. The dry warmth of the old library is a reliable balm- the yellowed fluorescent lighting washing out the rows and rows of slate-grey plastic bookshelves lined up like soldiers over prerevolutionary tile, with its woven edges and dark, jeweled pinwheels of color, stretching out endlessly full of books, reels, and the rare intricate portrait hanging overhead. Before them, long wooden tables dotted with mismatched lamps, flickering in and out of use, occupied by antsy juveniles and sleeping hobos. It feels effortlessly like home, like a shared worldly past that welcomes everybody- and maybe that just means that it's generic and a little overdue for renovations, but you love it as it is.

Shuffling through the tall shelves of books, you weave through mindlessly to find your favorite sections- the history, the art, and the meager offerings of political literature. You can hear your off-tune humming echo back to you somewhat feebly off the high, painted ceiling, done up in some lame facsimile of early Dolorian excess (therriers, noblewomen, forget-me-nots crowding the edges of each filligreed panel, dead-eyed faces in doleful expressions, pale and empty smiling). You've got all of daylight ahead of you, which is more than enough time to browse around as usual before you have to get yourself home and start cooking.

You turn the corner smoothly into the very back of the library, into a wider set of dusty and anachronistic wooden bookshelves-- history trends unpopular, though considering that all the books within are horrifyingly outdated due to a miserable municipal budget, maybe that's for the best. There are better places for students to get this information now, like the private library a couple blocks away at the _Cycle Université_ , or from dial-stations tuned unto the _Bibliotheque Nacionelle des Travailleures_ , now run by Coalition-approved volunteers (with the name shortened to just _La Nacionelle_ , of course, but you refuse to call it that on principle). The first thing to catch your eye is two thinly-stocked shelves of works of infracultural expression and documentation- essays and short stories from New authors, studies and zines on Disco, and of course, a section on the homo-sexual underground.

You've read everything in this section- theory, history, photography- even, notably, the single commercial romance novel, comically bad, about a middle-aged Vespertine businessman travelling north to the harbour where he had experienced his first teenaged love-- and the young, strapping man he gets to know there. (There are boats involved- it's very biblical). All in all, you read it twice, meticulously rewrote its horrifyingly vague and unsafe sex scenes (in pen, inside... Not like the librarian's gonna check it) and masturbated at your efforts, winning you a very sore wrist and about 30 minutes of crying because you remembered being in a bookshop with Kim in Martinaise while you were remembering what the world was, and then remembered Jean's apartment having a secret stack of equally terrible heterosexual novels bequeathed to him by an ex that you made fun of him for (rabidly, for years). You shudder, now, at the sight of its cracked spine looking you from the middle sill. Its gaze feels hefty and judgmental, and you do not like it.

Above and below the sparse couple shelves dedicated to infraculture, there are a variety of heavier tomes dealing with aspects of universal history- the old world, pre-innocentic life, history and religion, the innocences themselves, the dolorean era and its conquests, as well as the life on the new new world beyond. Revolutionary-era textbooks and their post-revolutionary counterparts stand side to side, almost in tangible tension with each other, enemy soldiers in opposite color garb. Alongside them, flimsily tucked into cloudy plastic bins, are a variety of manuals, blueprints and manuscripts, most for technologies decades too old to be of any use to a modern reader. Still, there’s a beauty in the draftsmanship- the hand-drawn feel of engraved diagrams, dark black lines crossing over intricately to give form to each illustration or design. You’ve tried to copy them before, and though your attempts are still pretty rusty, there is a sense of instinct in them- something from your past that’s peeking through. You harbor a secret little hope that someday you’ll be able to make a drawing of the Kineema in that style, as a gift to Kim, perhaps, or maybe just to keep as a memory.

Moving past the shelves of history books, you take to drumming on the bassy wood as you saunter by, continuing your melody- you can’t help but wonder what Kim is up to, after thinking about him again. Maybe he’s taking a proper rest, laid down and listening to the radio, or maybe he’s out working on his motor-bike. Kim, Kimmy Kim Kim. Somehow his name ends up in your song, just a litany of permutations on it, dredged from the corners of your mind devoted to spinning out the coils of your affection for him. Kim-Kimmy Kim-Kimmy Kimmy-Kim Kim. Kimster. Kimbo. Kitsy. Kitty. Cutie. You keep drumming and whistling long enough past that one to ignore the twist of shame you feel about calling your 43-year-old male partner cutie, even just in your head (and even if he’s cute) and to get to the shelves on home economics, packed in with colorful, thick-spined volumes on different household tasks, largely technical advice and cookbooks from a variety of regions and culinary styles.

You didn’t really find cooking after Martinaise as much as it found you- those first few couple of months of sobriety had been tough on you, so tough you mostly can’t remember what you even did (and mostly couldn’t remember while you were doing it), so it took a while to realize that you’d been somehow effortlessly cooking for yourself the whole time with minimal risk to your health (imagine your surprise, when the horrible haze of substance abuse and withdrawal started clearing and you realized you knew *how bread was made* just off muscle memory. You may forget who you are or where you live, but apparently, bread is eternal) and even a bit of prowess. It was something to lean on, while you were trying to teeter away from depending so heavily on Kim and onto living and functioning on your own- something that kept you alive, and usually aware enough after a while in a way more difficult to reinterpret into another bad habit. Cooking food is an achievement, and it feels good both to work through and to finish, but especially to share, as mixed as the reception has been amongst the people in your life. 

You potluck fairly often with your cycling friends, although most of them have more refined tastes than you by virtue of being further up the line toward middle-class, and at the precinct Trant and Judit have been more than kind about it- you’ve shared recipes and leftovers with them more than a couple times already, chattered halfheartedly about advice for using the limited time you have from work to make things that are nice enough to eat. Jean just gave you an unreadable look, when you mustered up the courage to offer something to him- it’s been difficult between you from the start, but there was almost something worse about it then. You felt far too ashamed to ask him, so the feeling’s been largely just left to hang in empty air. You hope it doesn’t bother him too much, like it bothers you- you’ve tried to make a point to give him space away from you.

As for Kim, well, you’re mostly not sure what he likes. He seems a little fussy about where and what you eat, but you’ve only ever seen him bringing takeout to the office, or having plainer things, like simple sandwiches. The couple awful nights you spent over at his place are too blurry to remember anything specific, with both your mind and sense of taste mostly out of order still, so you don’t even know what he keeps around or cooks at home- if he can cook at all. You recall bits of a particularly difficult episode near the beginning of your recovery, when you were trying to front it all mostly alone and cold showers weren’t quite cutting it, wherein an incomprehensible turn of events and compulsions (in tandem with the unfortunate fact that supermarkets *do* sell alcohol, and the fortunate fact that whatever poor slummy butcher shop you managed to shuck into the back of your permanent memory *doesn’t*) left you with a surplus of fish stock, some of which made its way to Kim, mainly by accident. In the aftermath, clearly trying his best, Kim had lied unconvincingly that the soup had been good (in that way he has of trying to tell white lies, clearly unaccustomed to it, always turned away from you and awkwardly patting at your upper arm for a touch too long for the gesture to seem natural— which is an odd method of comfort if anything but one you have a vested and admittedly selfish interest in leaving entirely unquestioned). Upon hearing your clarification of its purpose and mild, tentative offer to teach him how to make it into proper soup or other dishes, you swore you could see the tips of his ears glow. So, he probably doesn’t know how to cook very many things, or even really care about eating anything too nice or too complex, as long as it suits his particular tastes (you’re embarrassed by how it makes you melt a little to think of this one truly relaxed habit of his, and of the devastatingly cool lieutenant, competent and mature, still being a picky eater at his age. Really, if it was anyone else, you’d probably be preparing a lecture on the value of appreciating the culinary arts right now—you think you might’ve done that to Jean at some point, considering how quickly he springs to mind at the thought of it).

Trying to keep what you know in mind, you settle the pool of warring feelings in your gut and look out at your options, mentally shucking out and queuing in each offering by their potential—nothing too heavy because it’s dinner and you’re both older, nothing too pungent, since Kim seems not to like that, nothing too fiddly to eat, since you’re sure to embarrass yourself with your lack of finesse and stupid gorilla hands… In the end, your eyes land on an old, reliable, favorite, its battered yellow cover peeking out from behind a plastic divider. It’s an older Mesque cookbook, published sometime during the 30s, probably, with cheap folk recipes adapted to appeal to newly working young wives of the era with little time and less money on their hands, some even easy enough for a kid to make. You tentatively flip the pages, letting the bright monochrome of its cheaply-printed images float in from of you (if you blur your eyes it’s almost like a Rorschach test-- ‘is that a plate of crawfish or is it two bears doing an ace’s high?’) until you reach a page that sparks your fancy. From the mess of pinks in front of you, you can make out a sunny-side-up egg sitting proudly on a mound of indistinguishable blobs of color—a peek at the list of ingredients suggests Ham and thin fried potatoes, as well as some sort of sauce.

Suddenly, a noise like the cry of a wild animal breaks out inside the library. You feel a pit of fear at the bottom of your gut- empty, sinking. Could it be wolves? Stray dogs? A rabid, crimedoing animal of indeterminate species?

Or it could be your stomach, because you haven’t eaten since morning and it’s already starting to get dark out. Your eyes dart back down to the recipe- _Huevos Rotos_ \- and run a quick bit of inventory. You’ll need to drop by the supermarket anyway, so you might as well go to the nice one in Couron with the little sandwich counter and treat yourself (somewhere in your back pocket, your wallet weeps). You think of the process to go to for tonight, and you think about the cigarettes you half-remember hiding, and you think about the taste of freshly-fried chips coming out of the pot after they’ve been salted, but mostly you think about Kim.

You think about Kim at your doorway, of his posture, of what clothes he’ll wear, of the small, slow roll of his shoulders he does after he’s just gotten off his motorbike. You think of how his coat will smell in your hands, as you bring it up to your chest to fold it for him and put it away: of little by virtue of him being so clean but at least somewhat of him, of his cologne and his aftershave and the motor oil he’s always sort-of followed by, of smoke. You think of what to talk about, and what you want to ask, and wonder what he’d say to you in answering. You think about every potential blunder or mistake or total catastrophe, and you think about every impossible victory, and you try very hard to remember that both those extremes in luck had some hand in bringing you to him, and that in the end, Kim is just one human man who will come through your doorway tonight to spend time with you. that he might have your heart in his hands, but he’s still one human man with a lifetime obsession, and a sensitive palette, and a party-pooping sense of work ethic, and who is so, terribly, successfully prideful that he’s probably vetted his outfit for tonight on a pro/con list of precisely the image he wants you to see. In fact, he’s probably squinting at himself in the mirror as you stand here and worry about it... 

.

.

.

.

You stand in front of your entry hall’s mirror and squint again.

  * Your eyesight won’t get any better from this second to the last. 
    * Your eyesight won’t get any better.
  * Your appearance won’t either, unless you change… again. 
    * And you’ve spent about an hour getting ready, already. 
      * That rhymed. Do you have the rest of a line for that? 
        * You don’t—it dies in the air like most of your poetry.
      * You’re just going to have dinner at a colleague’s house. You shouldn’t be fussing over your outfit so much. 
        * Harry’s house—Harry the guy who wears a kids’ frog-themed sports visor to crime scene investigations because he claims it ‘makes him more perceptive’(quot.)
        * ~~Harry who already thinks you’re ‘devastatingly cool’(quot.)~~



You’re meant to go to Harry’s for dinner—1h to leave → set time: 7:30pm.

  * He invited you a week ago, after work. Proposed to cook for you to ‘prove his honor as a master chefcop’(quot.) 
    * ‘master chefcop’? 
      * Harry can get a little eccentric, in conversation, but this is a new one.
      * He’d usually be more verbose about the precise honor he’s defending, when he’s serious about it. But he didn’t go into it this time, just kind of stared away expectantly. 
        * If he’s ever serious about it. Maybe he’s been laughing at your expense this whole time. 
          * ~~Harry wouldn’t do that to you.~~
        * He was a little bashful about it. 
          * So, he probably has a better reason to invite you, an actual reason. 
            * ~~It’s a romantic gesture.~~
            * He’s probably trying to apologize for that episode with the fish broth, a while back while you were working on THE STONE-COLD WOMAN. 
              * He’s taken care not to embarrass you about your lack of knowledge, in that case.
            * He might be doing poorly and needing your help. 
              * He seems upbeat, though.
              * Working out regularly is doing him a lot of favors, he’s been looking healthier. 
                * ~~You’ve been doing a lot of looking.~~
              * He’s gotten along with most of the precinct, although he’s not too talkative yet. 
                * Especially with Satellite-Officer Vicquemare. 
                  * You shouldn’t pry. They’ve been civil enough.
                * You haven’t noticed anything concerning in his anecdotes. You were usually able to tell before he could that something was wrong. 
                  * Sometimes it took you too long, though. 
                    * ~~The sight of Harry’s arms that first month, red-raw and scrubbed over. The skin on his knuckles thin and inflamed, dead veins bulging painfully amongst dead skin. The smell of his apartment on that afternoon in summer- like the dead, like he was about to become another half-empty journal hastily shoved to the back of the bookshelf, like--~~



TO DO: CHECK UP ON HARRY WHEN YOU GET THERE

The kitchen clock strikes 7 with a sharp acoustic click. You should start heading out there.

  * GRIH, 740A to Jamrock, 5642 Perdition → ETA: 7:20pm. 
    * You went apartment hunting but did not move. Between the morning traffic and the horses on the streets that only make it worse, it was a poor choice. 
      * ~~The cost of a furnished prerevolutionary on Perdition is 3,000 réal per month, on two lieutenants’ salaries that splits into 1,500 réal a month for rent, 100 on groceries, 150 for health insurance, 25 for--~~
    * If you arrive too early, you can always wait around the block for a moment. 
      * ~~It would look over-eager to show up so long before the agreed time.~~
        * ~~You *are* eager, what’s so bad about that, looking forward to things? Looking forward to an evening with a friend?~~



You look over your outfit one last time, as you fish out the keys to your bike (a cobalt-blue Coupris Elektra, decked out with whitewall wheels and extensive personal touches).

  * White undershirt (winter, 100% cotton)
  * Brown heather sweater (rolled collar, flatteringly tight on the shoulders—you resist the urge to roll the sleeves)
  * Black straight-cut jeans (tight, women’s size, several *decades* old)
  * Black lace up boots 
    * You look the same as you usually do, and you’re comfortable.



Needs a final touch.

  * Black leather driving gloves (thin, full coverage)
  * Black leather motorcycle jacket



Can’t forget—

  * Small gift bag (brown paper, unassuming)



Perfect. Let’s get going.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> short chapter! watch how hard Kim can pine!! fuckit!!

Harry’s house:

  * Smells like freshly cooked bacon and incense. 
    * You can hear sizzling somewhere in the background.
    * Your mouth waters a little. ~~~~
  * Has surprisingly warm lighting. 
    * The bulbs had burnt out last time you were here. 
      * You’re surprised he managed to fix them on his own. 
        * ~~You were somewhat hoping he would ask for help with that.~~



“Kim-hmm… Kim! Hello, Kim! You’re, uh… you’re here!”

  * He dragged the first ‘m’ for a second too long- did he intend to call you something else? 
    * He seems embarrassed.



He opens the door, and immediately there are a million little things that test you (hell, with that thick-knit sweater he's wearing, anything less than your best efforts would have you jump him then and there). The half-up style of his now so soft looking auburn hair that splits across his shoulders to reveal the pale white of his nape between the raised collar of his sweater, the kind wrinkling of his open smile upon seeing you walk in, the light, jazzy music of the radio backing his belly-deep laugh as he tries to awkwardly clear the air are all exhilaratingly Harry to you.

  * He’s standing right in front of you, at the door. His arms are spread out a little, awkwardly, like he’s wrestling with himself about whether or not to try to pull you in for a hug. 
    * ~~It only hurts more that he’s so obvious about these things.~~
  * He’s wearing a sweater. 
    * The sweater is white. 
      * You struggle to take in information about it. 
        * It’s a very good sweater. 
          * It hugs his figure well. 
            * You can make out the contours of his chest- his soft gut perking out past solid muscle. 
              * ~~You risk a shameless glance downward to see the hem does, in fact, rise to show a little of his belly.~~
                * ~~You thank every innocence in human history that you cannot blush.~~
              * The way his neck is almost peeking out behind the collar sets off a lightning-fast train of thought in your mind. 
                * ~~Him taking the marks enthusiastically at night. The day after, bruised over, him trying his best to hide them, picking at his collar in embarrassment all day, always aware of them, always reminded of the way they got there, of who put them there, of you.~~



You nod in greeting up at him.

“Good evening, Harry. Thank you for the invitation.”

  * He’s staring at you. 
    * His blue-green eyes are wide and attentive, you can almost hear the gears in his mind spinning—what is he trying to hash out? 
      * He’s staring at the bag in your hands.



Unassuming brown paper gift bag:

  * Contains one (1) jar of Epsom salts in a mild, citrusy scent. 
    * It’s too late for this to be a housewarming gift, but you technically didn’t give him one before, so it can be taken as one.
    * Adults usually bring something to dinner—you can’t cook, so it’s not like you’d be able to bring a dish to share, and bringing flowers would be…
    * Harry has mentioned a couple times that he struggles with mustering up the energy to go through a daily routine. You’ve seen some of it in action, but from how he talks about it, showering is probably the worst for him. 
      * He’s also commented, offhand, that he likes the way you smell. 
        * ~~A frigid afternoon on a quiet street, standing side-by-side at the Kineema, trying to engage the radio to make a call. He stands taller than you, as usual, but today you swear you can feel him leaning in. ‘Kim, the smell of your shampoo is so nice. I don’t know how I hadn’t noticed that before…’~~
          * He was barely getting sober then. He said anything that crossed his mind. Between the pain medication for his wounds and his constant exhaustion, you can’t assume he was in full control of his faculties, or even that he remembers saying anything like that.
        * He takes your jacket, now, but doesn’t let himself linger on it until it’s off your shoulders. You can hear him lightly inhale as he turns to set it aside.
      * It’s a pleasant, thoughtful gift that doesn’t overstep a line. 
        * Although it tested you—you suppose most things to do with him do, at this point. You remember standing in the store, remembering the feeling of Harry’s hair between your fingers while you were trying to clean the blood off it, nursing him back to health. Thinking of its current length, of what it might be like to brush it for him, braid it like you used to do with yours, as a kid. How he might find that pleasant.
        * It might still not be in your best intentions: Ever since you were young, you’ve always been obsessed with sigils, stamps and decals, things custom-made or tailored to you, all the little ways that something could be only yours… 
          * ~~There are better ways to mark him, if that's really your intent. Much more pleasant ways for both of you- and god, look at him, at how he looks at you- he'd want it, wouldn’t he?~~
            * But there’s protocol to keep in mind. Your work, your hierarchical positions, your age, his current situation… ~~~~
            * ~~There's also a sort of joy in knowing no-one else can tell except for you this way, somehow.~~



“come in, come in—”

Harry's apartment is no longer clean, but not as dirty as before, and its stalwart light-green walls seem, in the winter light, less queasy and foreboding like before, and more what they are now, almost dainty in the contrast of the sparse few frames and piles of knickknacks on the floor. 

Believe it or not, this is good-- sometimes, life with Harry makes you feel like a zoologist, intricately analyzing an animal's pile of leaves and refuse and knowing, despite all human standards, what these habits mean for the foreign species. And for Harry, mess like this is good. It means he's kept busy by any one of his million little projects, picked up and put down at a dizzying speed and constancy, each one increasingly out of left field in scope and subject matter (did he ever finish that Wirral campaign inspired by that antedolorian cult leader? And do you want to ask, lest you get whisked up into “game night” again?)

You watch as he scurries back into the kitchen to check up on whatever’s cooking back there and restrain your smile. His humming along to the radio, even while breathless, sounds out loud enough that you can still hear it as you look around to get a better lay of the land.

  * He trusts you in his space, he doesn’t treat you like a guest.
  * At least out here, there isn’t anything to hide—no bottles amongst the trash (just a couple of mugs half-full of coffee teetering at awkward angles) and no suspiciously clean spaces either. 
    * It’s promising.



“hey Kim, how’d you like your eggs?”

Harry’s poked out his head through the doorway, tilted at an angle not unlike a confused dog. There’s a mild, warm smile under those whiskers of his.

“ khm. What do you mean?”

He just smiles wider beckons you forward enthusiastically, into the kitchen.

“It’s an eggy dinner! I’m making them now ‘cause they have to be fresh, do you like a runny yolk or a hard one?”

The kitchen is small, only a little more than a runway in between two walls of cooking appliances and cabinets, and it smells heavenly inside- of fried things and lemon and rosemary in a combination that make you entirely aware of how hungry you are while Harry set up a pan with enough butter that you start to feel a twinge of worry for both your aging hearts.

“… over-easy is my favorite.” Harry just beams back down at you.

“comin’ right up then, lieutenant!”

  * A thought strikes you immediately, undeniably: you want to have mornings like this, with him. You want to stand in his bathroom next to him, shoulder to shoulder in the dark winter midmorning, hearing him hum like before while he cleans his ears. 
    * It makes you feel deplorable, a little. You're a grown adult with nothing to be ashamed of and you were well-prepared (if disappointed in yourself) for the more adult imaginings, for that heat that sometimes cuts through you because of him, but not for this. Not for the fitful, almost-constant fear that you're coaxing a poor, recovering man into some sick domestic fantasy without him even realizing.
  * He’s got his sleeves rolled up while he focuses on cooking the eggs. You can see some scars, sure- collapsed veins from years of drug use, nicks from work or home accidents, still some scarring from the worst of those first months- but nothing new. 
    * The relief that flows through you at this realization in palpable, significant. 
      * And yet it’s followed by a deep drought of regret. 
        * ~~You'd like him to take care of himself. You'd like to be there to do it for him when he can't.~~



TO DO LIST ITEM COMPLETED: CHECK UP ON HARRY WHEN YOU GET THERE

Harry seems to be doing fine. Make sure to keep checking up on his routine-related issues, since those feel like they could stack up at difficult moments.

“--isn’t it funny?”

You tune back in to look up at him.

“that we ended up matching, a little- isn’t that funny?” he says, almost coyly. “I never thought the day would come, eh? Maybe some of my amazing aesthetic sense is rubbing off on you, ki-mm…”

  * He did it again. That thing with your name. 
    * His palms are beating a rhythm on his hips now. _Tak-takka-tak-takka-takka-tak-tak_ … Is that from any song you know? 
      * He does listen to a lot of radio these days… could it be your name sounds something like a song lyric? 
        * You do your best to cut the thread before it gets away from you. This isn’t an investigation.



But when you look down at yourself and back at Harry, you realize what he means- you’re both wearing similar sorts of light-colored sweaters- and even though you realize it’s a stretch it makes you feel surprisingly fond even as it gets you thinking of the sort of things you usually find trite. Of young, overeager couples and their aged, married counterparts in matching sets of clothing, of you and Harry twenty years from now, perhaps, wasting time together in some impossible retirement scenario, on the beachside like you’ve seen so many times, or in one of the several benches lining the shore in Martinaise.

“well, it is cold outside…”

You want to say he looks good. You want to talk about it with him, about the image in your mind- even in jest, you’d like to venture out and say ‘yes, detective, we look like an old married couple’, see the pallor of his face grow bright again, leave him tongue-tied for once and for celebratory reason.

“… and I wouldn’t say I’m quite convinced by the Disco school just yet. Is that done?”

The most you can do is lightly smile, and hum in the direction of an egg well on its way past over-easy.

“hmn? Oh-- fuck!”


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> IT'S FINALLY DOOOOONE

“It just kind of… happened? Honestly, I don’t remember much of what was going on then. I guess I must’ve learned to do it while I was living alone, or something.”

You’re sitting across from each other, the radio almost entirely quiet now, your plates streaked with grease and stomachs full, calm and satisfied. The night is a square of inky black lit up in warm and cool-toned colors, from the windows of the nearby tenements. The lights blur together on your retinas and blur into what might look like land-borne stars to someone more poetic.

  * There’s also the light echo of wailing in the streets. That’s less poetic. 
    * It’s too far down to distinguish well enough, still—might be moans of pleasure, or cheers of joy, or a universal reminder of your shared stupidity, the city offering up her barefaced complaints at your refusal to be open with each other. 
      * You ignore them, whatever they are.



To you, here and now, the lights don’t mean anything, they just look pretty behind Harry as he chatters on at you.

“well, you’ve certainly got a talent for it,” you can’t help but smile into your napkin a little.

  * You’re getting too old for this. 
    * You feel like you might’ve always been too old for this. 
      * or too young-- too stubborn to be honest, even now.



“consider your honor as a… how did you put it, *master chefcop*? Well and thoroughly restored. Thank you for the meal, Harry.”

He fires his usual finger-guns at you. You start to get up and take the plates towards the sink, but he stops you.

“hey, hey, hey, Kim, put those down!”

You ready the eyebrow. He visibly flinches.

  * The little games you’ve learned to play. The little tells, with him. 
    * He sees the same in you and plays you like a fiddle.



“nuh-uh, you’re a guest, *lieutenant*, so go sit your tush down. I’ll do it.”

“Harry,”

  * you aren’t sure how to say it, now. Without making it sound so significant. 
    * ‘After all this time together’?
    * ‘with who we are for each other’?
    * ‘with all that I’ve seen of you and you’ve seen of me’?



“I can assure you my… *tush* can survive washing a couple dishes.”

He only stands straighter at this, legs akimbo in a power stance as he reaches out to try and take the plates from you. It seems mostly like a genuine effort- his face is scrunched up in a peculiar sort of concentration, pink tip of his side tongue sticking out to one side, just visible under his disco mustache- but his gesture is odd. No attempt to use his sizeable hands to pry the dishes from yours, no tight hold on your wrists or any other sort of foul play. Instead, he seems to be trying his best to snatch them from you without touching you, ending up with a gesture like a strange dance in the process.

  * Well, if he wants to dance…



You sidestep him, plates and utensils balanced in your hands, and start to try and pad back into the kitchen, hopping out of the way in time with his forward swipes, but the momentum and growing competitive spirit ensure you’re never too far apart. Your eyes have met, locked in an embarrassingly serious challenging gaze, and you’re so deep into it, the adrenaline and focus and the movement, that neither of you is laughing, despite the bubbling sunlight feeling leaking into your throat from your lungs. The couple meters’ distance feels unknowingly extended, so much so that you’re almost genuinely shocked once your back hits the kitchen door.

  * Harry is tall. 
    * 180cm, almost one whole head taller than you. 
      * Wider too. 
        * He’s also warm. Even looming a touch away, you can feel the warmth of him. 
          * He smells clean. 
            * It doesn’t escape you that a bar this low to cross shouldn’t feel so significant.
            * It does, though, feel significant. 
              * He smells cheap and new. Like the sort of artificial blend of flowers used in laundry soaps for children. 
                * ~~He managed to do this himself, you know. You didn’t need to butt in, clearly. He doesn’t need you like that. It’s better that he doesn’t need you.~~



“you’re wide open, Kitsy!”

  * _Kitsy_?



you’re not holding the plates anymore. Harry’s taken both of them and stepped back.

  * _Kitsy_? Did he just call me _Kitsy_?



The warmth is gone but so is the adrenaline that kept your shame at bay. You’re both breathing heavy. You’re sure your ears are burning red.

“ _Kitsy_?”

  * If you’re burning red, Harry is possibly experiencing mass explosion on his face. 
    * It never fails to thrill you to see him flush from something other than alcohol.



“I- uh… Uhm.. Kim, I-“ he’s blabbering in genuine concern, like he thoroughly did not intend to say that, his eyes darting towards yours openly but never managing to catch on in his embarrassment.

  * It’s becoming a distinctly palpable effort to keep yourself from reaching up and kissing him, like a character in some terrible romance novel.
  * And *too much* of an effort not to keep playing with him, in this state.



“khm, so now it’s *not* Kitsy, detective?”

“I- I’m so-“

“sorry? For what?” you draw the phrase out, and with your current, breathless state it sits thickly in your accent.

  * He’s looking at your lips rather intently.



He demurs—the pause long enough that you suspect he’s convening with those voices in his head, taking this really seriously. He breathes deep and steady before opening his mouth.

“…For nicknaming you out of the blue like that, after… everything. It won’t happen again, lieutenant.”

  * The earnestness of his wet, downturned stare, his deference towards you, the use of your title… all fill you with a shock of warmth entirely disproportionate to the impact and intent of that statement. 
    * So, settle the score.



“It’s fine—there is nothing to apologize about, _Harrier_.”

  * …alright, you may have given him a heart attack. 
    * Take the plates from him. Just in case his fingers are going to slack as much as his jaw is right now. 
      * And start heading into the kitchen proper before your own heart gives out too.



They reach their destination with a light plink that’s almost inaudible over the sound of your own pulse in your ears. After a second, you feel the same dull warmth return to your back as you’d expected.

  * What you don’t expect is the hot breath of his voice against the left side of your nape.



“Kim, please…”

  * … you *may* currently have a hard-on.



“let me do this for you,” he continues. “you do so much for me, you do so much… I wanna take care of you, for that. Let you relax.”

  * You *definitely* have a hard-on. 
    * Sorry about that. 
      * …You really did try your best.



“Harry…”

  * Your voice is rough around the edges, tremulous.



You take a deep breath.

“how about we go have a cigarette instead?”

At his small noise of assent, you steel yourself to turn around.

  * At the very least, it’s not like he’ll be able to *see* it. 
    * He’s incredibly perceptive, he doesn’t need to see it. 
      * Not that he needs to be, when it’s this obvious in everything else about you.



But once you clear the thumping of your heart from your eardrums, you hear something that you entirely did not expect.

The sound of *rustling*.

You turn around to see Harry doing some sort of funny jog around the room, looking into vases and under cushions, in drawers and behind stacks of books, walking steadily, almost on his tiptoes until he stops, turns, and starts to drag a chair to the middle of the room.

  * Is he… disabling the smoke detector? 
    * The light on it is already off. 
      * But he’s still reaching for it. 
        * Is he… what *is* he doing? 
          * Is… Is that a cigarette inside the battery case. Is he taking out a cigarette from a smoke detector.



You do your best to resist the urge to burrow your head in your hands.

  * You’re not sure if you’re more disappointed in him or in yourself. 
    * The answer is you, of course. He’s a hallucinating late-stage alcoholic with prophetic voices in his head and you should probably be more empathetic about whatever that was. And stop acting like a horny teenage boy around him.



Harry climbs down carefully from his perch and brandishes the slightly crumpled stick with a victorious grin that only becomes sheepish when he meets your eyes.

“ah… Yeah, I hid my cigarettes so that I wouldn’t smoke too much.”

The look in his eyes as he admits this flows through you with a little sympathetic shake. It’s been pretty hard for him to get better on a purely physical level, but the distrust around his sobriety couldn’t have helped—you’ve witnessed much of it firsthand, seeing the looks and tones taken around him as well as directly towards you, the misplaced pity, the confusion at your empathy for him.

  * He trusts you. 
    * And he knows that he can’t lie to you, about this. That he doesn’t want to.



You swallow down the lump that’s forming in your throat and nod towards the balcony, and as you start to light up, you can hear the dull thud of his steps as he follows behind you.

  * He has to bend down, a little, to walk out into the night. 
    * He has to bend down a touch further, too, to get a light from you.



The cigarette lights up Harry’s face like a housefire- leagues brighter, warmer, than any light out in the street at this hour. It’s a too-harsh tone for the concerned silence in his face.

“… you’re doing your best.”

And he laughs. And as always, the sound’s just a little bit stuck in his throat, and his whole face is moving with it.

  * like a tremor.
  * like a train wreck.



“hey, whatever works, right?”

  * Like a fast-blooming flower in those looping film reels pyr addicts watch on repeat.



“does it?” you feel the need to ask. “Work, for you?”

And when his face straightens out from its pucker of laughter the cig is like stage-lighting.

  * He was made to perform. You’ve seen him in action, and now again you can see how it suits him.



“well… I find them, sure, but I smoke little, I smoke less. It’s something I can do at once to make things be a little better.”

He’s looking straight down at you and the balcony is small. There’s something in his eyes…

  * A lifetime of burst veins.
  * His lashes, long and heavy, light.
  * The glow of the cigarette, still, floating.
  * A bit of dust. From the smoke detector, probably.
  * Admiration, love. 
    * And with it something of the pain you saw on his face in the church in Martinaise, three visits in, once he gathered himself and looked up to the stained-glass window, asked you for its history.



“how do you do it?”

  * Something tells you ‘cross your lungs’. 
    * The way he’s looking at you feels like heresy.



“… do what”

“your One. Did you start off with it from the beginning or…”

And you think of the way he’s looking at you, in this moment, and think back to the man you used to be- to the boy, just as nervous, not yet so put together, weighed down so heavy but somehow still more free.

“khm. No, I didn’t.”

And you think about the truth—that your One is an unnecessary trial of will for something more than artifice or image, that’s it’s a bright, burning reminder that you work like hell only because you get up and choose to every second. That you were once a social smoker, an after-dinner-if-the-date-is-pleasant smoker, an after-sex smoker, a bumming-cigarettes-to-gague-his-interest smoker (that it all started with a boyfriend you wanted, foolishly, to impress). That police work and all its irrationalities and injustices drove you to once-per-day, to become even moreso a creature of obsession than before. That you had to fight to keep it to one and still have to, and that it’s nothing to look up to like he does.

“I used to smoke less, actually… but by the time I was a sergeant I started to smoke one per day.”

And you can’t quite meet his eyes to say it, so you look down at your shoes, at the stinking alleyway beneath and the glowing tip of your own cigarette.

“I used to really resent it.”

“used to?”

There’s such a hope in his voice, all bright behind the rasp of his smoke and his accent, that you can’t help but smile as you stub out your soldier.

“Harry, do you want to grab that bag I brought in with me?”

.

.

.

.

.

The aftermath of everything smells like lemon. Almost like Kim, if you tried really hard to take away all the complexities of him. You sink deeper into the bath, the water in your ears warbling like so much space, and let the smell of it encompass you. Into your blank mind walk a host of memories—hello, hello there. Here, we’ll bring out the chairs for you, come in. You’ve given up on standards and on barring the door. Your limbic system roars with angry epithets, the olfactory system is up in arms, trying for charming configurations of smoke and sweat and citrus, the nucleus accumbens still holding out for that one single moment of proximity to rest upon forever. The houseguests trash the room, slamming windows with the sight of his thin smile good-bye, drinking you dry with the sound of the engine carrying him away and scrawling (like a mural, like graffito on the walls) the sensation of his hand, still gloved, so briefly brushing yours in comfort, in a final piece of company.

You love too much and know too little, your frontal lobe chimes in. And he still worries over you. He’s still somewhat afraid.

You still have much to settle, comes a whisper from below, tight in the temporal lobe. The pound of hooves on concrete, the rasp of a smoker’s cough, the smell of stronger cigarettes and with it the lights coming on bright in the basal ganglia. You want a cigarette- you might always want a cigarette- that kick of Firestarter in you, that small floodlight, the great and bright awareness of the world and of the moment, that clarity your love has made you lack. And sitting there with that desire is hard, of course it’s hard—with him around, you wouldn’t want to miss a single second of your life.


End file.
